China
Miéville Talks at KU

On September 24, 2009, China Miéville, a British author of what has been called the
New Weird, was the 2009 Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecturer, and he also gave a
reading of his novel-in-progress to a large audience in the Oread Bookstore on
September 23. His talk is on "Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory."

China Miéville's novel
Perdido Street Station launched a genre that combined
urban fantasy with the rigorous background and treatment customarily associated
with science fiction. The British author of two other novels in the
Perdido Street Stationuniverse, The Scar and Iron Council,
also published King Rat, Un Dun Lun, and the recent The City &
the City. Miéville also is an academic, with a B.A. from Cambridge and an
M.A. and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He has been a candidate for
the British House of Commons and has published a book on Marxism and
international law, as well as co-editing (with Mark Bould) Red Planets: Marxism and
Science Fiction (Early Classics of Science Fiction). His fiction
has been nominated for numerous awards and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke
Award twice and the Locus Magazine award. Miéville edited a special issue on
Marxism and fantasy for Historical Materialism and a forthcoming special issue
on Marxism and science fiction.

The Gunn Lecture, endowed by Dr. Richard W. Gunn, brother of James Gunn,
emeritus professor of English and director of the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn
Center for the Study of Science Fiction, has featured several science-fiction
scholars. Although it has also sponsored speakers on Shakespeare and Ralph
Ellison, it has brought a distinguished group of science-fiction experts to the
campus beginning with scholar Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor at Duke
University, and continuing with Bill Brown, Edgar Carson Waller Professor at the
University of Chicago. Michael Chabon, a prize-winning speculative-fiction and
mainstream author and editor, also presented at KU in 2008.